Spencer is the CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, a company formed to accelerate the development of CockroachDB. Previously, Spencer worked for 15 years at various and sundry companies including Square, Google, and a couple of his own startups. His experience at each stop along the way convinced him of the need for a better open source database. Before his professional career, Spencer co-authored the open source GIMP photo editing software while an undergraduate at UC Berkeley.